SCDC sets out vision for local democracy to strengthen community action
/This article was featured in the SCDC Weekly - 22nd May 2024.
Today we’ve published our response to the Democracy Matters 2 consultation where we’re calling for Scottish Government and CoSLA’s commitment to a new ‘Local Democracy Bill’ to include measures that give communities greater power and control over the issues the affect them.
Democracy Matters was part of the Scottish Government’s Local Governance Review which is exploring how power, responsibility and resources are shared with communities by government and local authorities.
What we’re proposing
In our response, we’ve set out how communities should have greater influence and control over public services that respond to local priorities through new and enhanced community engagement duties for public bodies. We want to see more community control where appropriate, and decentralisation of budgets built on a culture of partnership and power sharing.
We’ve also explored how communities can get the advice and assistance they need to develop or strengthen their own representative organisations. These groups should be supported to develop inclusive community-led action plans, representing local issues and setting out what resources are required, and how they could be used.
We think it’s vital that communities are supported to take on autonomous community action to help design, deliver where it makes sense, and evaluate local services - without over burdening them with more responsibility than they want to take on.
This should all be supported by skilled community development practiceand other support for communities to ensure that policy aims can be delivered, particularly in communities that face the other challenges of social exclusion, poverty and unequal access to services.
Next steps
To help make this happen, we’re proposing a new deliberative process to involve local people in detailed conversations, building on the ideas people have expressed so far, with the aim of determining concrete recommendations to inform a potential ‘Local Democracy Bill’ in spring 2025.
Our consultation response contains the full details of our proposals, and we’ll be exploring them further over the coming months.
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